United States

The current environment in the STEM workforce is one of unprecedented challenges and opportunities, demanding innovation and leadership skills. Current students must be forward-thinking to solve grand challenges and take advantage of diverse opportunities. To thrive in this workforce, students need a robust STEM curriculum that focuses on traditional and modern perspectives to address science and engineering applications. The goal of this project is a complete modernization of the advanced laboratory curriculum for our physics and engineering-physics students. The project has outcomes that include: 1. Outlining a curriculum plan for the modernization of our applied physics/engineering laboratory with the inclusion of modern equipment, applications, and new experimental Learning Lab modules 2. Establishing a student learning community that will inform instructional revisions by incorporating student input through the use of the Learning Assistant Program. 3. Providing outreach opportunities for increasing STEM interest by utilizing the student-developed modules at local high schools.

AAPT SM 20

Connecting Physics and Engineering through a Modernization of the Advanced Physics Laboratory Curriculum (CPE-MALC)

curriculum revision

learning assistant program

undergraduate laboratory

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

Listen to internationally known plenary speakers, attend sessions, workshops, and special activities. Attending the virtual summer meeting is an excellent opportunity to share your expertise and learn from and network with leaders in the field.

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AAPT SM 21

technical paper

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


Undergraduate science instructors typically have a diverse array of responsibilities, often complicated by mixed messaging surrounding the value and importance of teaching. If we hope to take Three-Dimensional Learning (3DL) to scale at the college level across institutions, disciplines, and content levels, it is critical that we develop and curate ways to reduce the perceived cost associated with such a transformation for these instructors. Based on analyses of large samples of assessments and instructional observations from introductory level chemistry, biology, and physics courses, we identify the Scientific Practice (SP) dimension as the key lever to initiating successful 3DL implementation. This message can be further streamlined with a conventional backward mapping lens to potential adopters: start by modifying existing assessment items to engage students in one of the SPs. Instructional adjustments will necessarily follow to support students’ success in the class.

3DL4US Project: Implementation Hinges on Scientific Practices

The PhysTEC program at Virginia Tech utilizes an effective collaboration, and division of labor, between the Physics Department and the School of Education. In the Physics Department students receive their content knowledge, acquiring a BS or BA in Physics. And they have early teaching experiences which provide moral sustenance to the students who have decided to pursue teaching, but also help some students to realize they wish to pursue teaching. These experiences include partaking in Physics Outreach, the Physics Teaching and Learning course, and the Physics Learning Assistant Program. With their BS/BA, our majors can then obtain a Masters of Education (MAEd) degree, in the School of Education. While they pursue their MAEd, the Physics Department financially supports these students as teaching assistants in Physics. This last aspect of our program is particularly important to our recruitment and production of physics teachers.

PhysTEC at Virginia Tech, Leadership in Action

We report on the use of data in guiding student’s self-assessment of mastery of the learning objectives. Online homework and assessment are commonly used in introductory physics courses. In a gradebook with multiple assignments it can be difficult for a student to realize where they stand with respect to specific learning objectives. We developed individual student-dashboards for the online and face-to-face physics students with a view to revealing the particular concepts they are yet to master and where the payoff from increased effort is maximized. Pearson and UF partnered over the last 6 months to enable students to view their performance relative to the class average at the learning objective level. We also implemented similar dashboards for groups in the group problem solving sessions with Learning Assistants. We report on how the Learning Assistants used the analytics to structure their study sessions.

Guiding Student Learning With Data

Peer-led recitation sections were implemented in introductory algebra-based physics courses to improve student success. Recitation attendance is required depending on student’s score on a diagnostic exam taken during the first two weeks of class. Recitations are led by two undergraduate Peer Facilitators, limited to about 25 students per section, and focus on problem-solving in small groups. An analysis of 2,738 students in first semester introductory algebra-based physics courses shows a positive correlation between recitation attendance and final exam score for the targeted students. Recitation structure and analysis results will be presented.

Impact of Peer-Led Recitations in Introductory Physics

Much effort has been expended to uncover forgotten contributions by women in physics and publicize examples of female physicists to students, largely to help female students see themselves in physics. However, the physicists who formulated the ideas taught in college courses were almost all men, and women’s absence from these most important roles will be noted by students. If we don’t acknowledge and address their absence, then female students won’t feel fully supported in their decision to become physicists, since they’ll see women only in less influential roles. We need to discuss the social context in which these most influential physicists worked. Since the necessary combination of educational opportunities, family support, social acceptance, financial means, and employment opportunities were available to a much smaller fraction of women than men, it’s no surprise that a small fraction of discoveries were made by women. This talk will present a brief sampling of history, looking at the opportunities of three important male physicists--James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Millikan, and Albert Einstein--and comparing them to their female peers. Just a few minutes of class time are needed to discuss this disparity, and also open the door to discussions of current social conditions.

Why Aren’t More Theories Named After Women?: Teaching Women’s History in Physics

At East Carolina University, we have been transforming our Introductory Lab Curriculum to privilege authentic science practices as a part of our XLABs (Cross-Disciplinary Lab Transformation) project (NSF-IUSE: #1725655). One of the science practices identified by the NGSS is analyzing and interpreting data. This practice is executed in computational environments in all modern scientific and engineering settings. I will discuss how we are integrating computation in our Introductory Physics labs, focusing on the environments that we are using and the ways that we are supporting student computational skill development.

Integrating Computation in Introductory Physics Labs

I grew up working at the carnival after school since I was 12, where I still work today. In high school, I was counseled into the “career training program,” which is where they directed all the brown kids. I asked if I could continue to study calculus in career training and they said, “No, take business math.” I said, “No. I won’t go.” I first found physics my 3rd of 6 years in college. It was math with glitter on top! And…I seemed to belong! I was good at it! I failed my first test though, because I worked 16 hours at the carnival the day before. The upshot is that I gained so much business sense over the years, which has helped me build and sustain programs such as the Learning Assistant Alliance and PEER Physics. I will discuss challenges that come from being a low-income, Chicana in physics.

Doing Physics While Being A Carnie

As part of a multi-institution collaboration, we are investigating the efficacy of educational interventions rooted in dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR). In prior work, we examined the extent to which students are able to follow and infer conclusions from reasoning chains that have been provided to them. In order to explore this issue, we developed a collection of tasks that are administered online to large populations of students in introductory calculus-based courses. We have previously reported that students who themselves respond correctly to the base task will be more likely to follow the correct reasoning chain provided. In this talk, we examine the factors that influence students to set aside their own reasoning and adopt correct reasoning when it is shared with them. The relation of our findings to DPToR, and the implications of our results for instruction and curriculum development will be discussed.

Investigating the role of cognitive reflection in following reasoning chains*

Involvement in undergraduate research has been shown to have positive effects on physics students, including improved conceptual and technical understanding, increased interest in graduate study, enhanced motivation for future coursework, and better scientific communication skills. Summer research programs, however, have not kept pace with the roughly tripling in the number of physics majors over the past 20 years. An alternative model is that of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) in which students gain research experience through a course. Here we present an example of a CURE in computational physics which produced three research projects: first, computational fluid dynamics model of so-called canopy waves, which have been observed in wind blowing through orchards; second, updating a classic result from astrophysics that explains the morphology of colliding galaxies; third, a futuristic update on the traveling salesman problem where our salesman travels through the solar system, which we term the traveling salestronaut.

A Computational CURE: Canopy Waves, Colliding Disks, and Traveling Salestronauts

Covariational reasoning--how a change in one quantity is related to a change in another quantity (e.g., a 1/r potential, or the exponential decay with time of a charged capacitor)--is integral to how scientists model the physical world. It is also a skill we expect students to develop as a result of introductory physics instruction. Little research has been done to characterize physics experts' covariational reasoning. Our research suggests that physics experts use a number of strategies--distinct from those of mathematics experts--that optimize thinking about physical quantities and how they relate to each other. We present a framework that describes physics expert covariational reasoning in introductory-level physics contexts as an important first step toward an understanding of students' covariational reasoning, how students' covariational reasoning changes over the course of physics instruction, and how instruction can be designed to help develop this important type of reasoning.

Connecting Physics and Engineering through a Modernization of the Advanced Physics Laboratory Curriculum (CPE-MALC)

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